Bold as Love: What Can Happen When We See People the Way God Does
193
Bold as Love: What Can Happen When We See People the Way God Does
193Paperback
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Overview
People often think of their neighbors as those already belonging to their “tribe” or community. It’s safe, it’s easy, and it doesn’t often cause conflict—politically or religiously. But in today’s world, everyone and everything is interconnected globally in an ever-changing cultural landscape, while religious strife runs rampant. Is it feasible for Christians to live their faith boldly and lovingly while entering into a true relationship with “neighbors” of other faiths, both locally and globally?
In Bold as Love, Pastor Bob Roberts shows you what it looks like to live out your faith daily in the global public square among people of other faiths—Jews, Muslims, atheists, Hindus, Buddhists. While he admits that it can be challenging to engage people of other faiths whose beliefs are as strong as yours, he demonstrates how to enter into this critical dialogue in a radical yet loving way. “We have to learn to speak with one conversation and give the same message everywhere to everyone,” he says. “We are commanded to love God and love others. And sometimes that requires risky boldness.”
Roberts invites you to respond to this call to live a life of fearless and loving engagement with the world. So take the risk! Your faith wasn’t made to live in isolation. It’s something you do face-to-face, heart-to-heart, hand-to-hand. Whether you are in a suburb of Houston or a village in India, put away the fear and suspicion and, instead, answer the call to radically love others the way God loves. And get ready to see your life and the lives of those you touch—your family, your community, even your enemies—transformed!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400204205 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nelson, Thomas, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 12/03/2012 |
| Pages: | 193 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
BOLD as LOVE
What can happen when we see people the way God doesBy BOB ROBERTS, JR.
Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2012 Bobby Gene Roberts, Jr.All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4002-0420-5
Chapter One
BOLDLY LOVING ALL MY NEIGHBORS
And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him, "What is written in the Law? How do you read it?" And he answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself." And he said to him, "You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live." But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"
—Luke 10:25–29
Nikki, my wife, and I drove all over Dallas–Fort Worth looking for kosher or halal meat. We barely knew what it was and didn't have a clue what made it different, but we had to have it, and time was running out.
We were desperate. An imam and a rabbi, along with their congregations, would be coming to our worship services the next morning, and the imam and the rabbi were coming to our home for lunch. This would be like no Sunday lunch I had ever experienced either as a boy growing up in a pastor's home, or as a fifty-year-old pastor of a megachurch. Nikki had researched online to make sure everything was prepared properly according to Jewish and Muslim tradition, but the meat was a problem.
Finally, we found a grocery store in north Dallas with a roast—the only one left and the only piece of kosher or halal meat in the entire store. At this point, we didn't care if it was a good one or a bad cut of meat, we just needed something. Roast it was, and roast it would be for lunch. We were as excited as two kids unwrapping presents at Christmas.
This Sunday occasion had come about not because I had some grand plan of getting to know Jews and Muslims, hoping to bring our congregations together. It was an unexpected series of events in which relationships morphed into friendships. I had been taught to believe that these were people merely to convert; friendship was a luxury I didn't think I had time for. But this luxury turned out to be not only vital and most exciting, but an experience that deepened my love of Christ and others in ways I could never imagine.
Starting the Journey
This particular event was birthed when I was challenged by an unlikely and unexpected friend from the Middle East. I was visiting Prince Turki al-Faisal, a humanitarian, statesman, and the founder of Saudi Arabia's modern intelligence service. He is the son of former King Faisal of Saudi Arabia and the grandson of King Abdul Aziz, the founder of the current Saudi monarchy, established in 1902. It goes without saying that he is also a Muslim.
I had first met him a few months earlier at a dinner in Lisbon, Portugal, where we both served on a think tank established by the United Nations under the Alliance of Civilizations. Called the Nyon Process, it was a handful of people gathering to talk about how to bridge the gap between people and religions (more on this dinner later). As a result, he later invited me to visit Saudi Arabia so we could get to know each other better and discuss ways to bring greater understanding between Christians and Muslims.
And I did.
At one point during the dinner in Lisbon, Portugal, the prince asked me, "What about Dallas, your home city—what are you doing there?"
I told him, "Your Highness, do you realize how hard it would be to do something between Muslims and Christians in Dallas, the buckle on the Bible belt? I don't mind being innovative, but I'm not suicidal! My Baptist and evangelical brethren would skin me alive for that!"
My friend responded, "All the more reason you should do it there. If you can do it there, you can do it anywhere. Dallas should lead the way."
I have to give it to him: he really knew how to motivate a Texan. We like to do the impossible.
A New Texas and a New World
Prince Turki may have had an intuition about Dallas that I didn't have at the time: how utterly diverse it had become in my lifetime.
The most diversity I experienced growing up was knowing a Catholic. That was about as wild as it got in Lindale, Texas, with a population of 1,043. Yes, there were African Americans in deep East Texas, lots of them, but they belonged; they had been there a long time, even if my subculture didn't always treat them right. But who were these Catholics? At the time, there wasn't even a Catholic church in Lindale. Catholics had to drive to Tyler to find a Catholic church.
There was a day when faith was tribal and defined by geography. Not anymore. Every religion is everywhere. Even in Dallas. Today, 44 percent of the population were not born in an English-speaking nation; 238 languages are spoken in the DFW area; 28 percent of the population don't speak English in their homes! We have Little Pakistan, Koreatown, Little Iran, Little India, Little Arabia, Chinatown, three Little Vietnams, four Little Mexicos, Little Nepal, Ethiopia/Eritrea.
Hispanics make up a large portion of the metroplex with roughly a million people. But there are also 40,000 Arabs, 90,000 Chinese, 25,000 Colombians, 5,000 Egyptians, 80,000 El Salvadorans, 7,500 Cambodians, 8,000 Bangledeshis, 15,000 Ethiopians, 90,000 Indians, 40,000 Iranians, 20,000 Ismaaelis, 50,000 Koreans, 25,000 Nepalese, 25,000 Nigerians, 10,000 North Africans, 50,000 Pakistanis, 30,000 Filipinos, 40,000 Polish, 22,000 Puerto Ricans, 80,000 Vietnamese, and dozens of other ethnicities. If this is Dallas—the jewel of Texas in the churchgoin' God-fearin' South—what about where you live?
In 1975 there was one mosque in the entire DFW area. Today there are forty-three. The closest mosque to me is about two miles away, the closest Buddhist temple is four miles, and the closest synagogue is five miles. The whole world is around me—and it's around you. What an opportunity! What a time to be alive!
But let's face it, we've got mixed feelings about this new world. We've all had that feeling when we find out the person who moves next door to us is a Muslim. We feel it when a gay couple holding hands in the mall wearing matching pink T-shirts that say "Jesus loves me too!" catches the attention of our small children, and we have to explain in a way that holds on to who we are but makes clear who they are but in a loving way. God has allowed us to be born and be alive at a time when we will run into all sorts of people who need to know the love of Jesus.
What's happening in the DFW metroplex is happening in many other cities in America and in the world. Two books that look at how immigration is changing our world are Doug Saunders's Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World, and Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, and Meera Balarajan.
Others are noting how other forces of globalization are shrinking the world and making Everyplace a global reality. Note especially Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World (Release 2.0), Niall Ferguson's Civilization: The West and the Rest, Jeffrey Sachs's The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity, and Thomas Friedman's That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back. In their book God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, editors at the Economist, also note how all religions are growing globally, and what impact that is going to have.
So we are doing a good job at seeing what globalization means for economics, education, engineering, science, and communications—although especially as it relates to religion, it's leaving some people mystified and others afraid.
I sat on a plane with an executive from Ernst & Young, a Fortune 100 company. This executive had just heard several global speakers talk about many such troubling future trends. He was really shaken up about the implications for America and his children. He said the only hope was for people across the world to connect with one another in a meaningful way, or it would be decades of war between the haves and the have-nots.
He asked what I did, and I told him I was a pastor. That's when he said earnestly, "What are you doing to prepare the church for this? It's serious, man."
It is serious, but from a gospel perspective, it is also one of the greatest opportunities in history. I meet born-again Christians in the Middle East and Muslims in the West and New Agers everywhere. Now the conversation is between orthodox Christians and Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists—you name it. There is no privacy anymore—everything is in the global public square. We have to learn to speak with one conversation and give the same message everywhere to everyone.
In the past, we would have one conversation with ourselves, one with our family, one with our tribe, and one with the world. Each conversation was suited to the audience. How do we speak in a globalized world with everyone listening? More importantly, how is it heard by people not in our tribe? There are multiple faiths all around vying for converts, promising salvation, and claiming to be the way.
It is both an opportunity and a nightmare. It's an opportunity for us to share and live out our faith as "missionaries" at home, but a nightmare if we disrespect cultures or don't realize the power of what our words can do. Islamophobia is no joke in the West, and recently in the news from Egypt they were talking about "Christianophobia." How do we respond? What are we to believe? What is the truth? I've discovered we often don't really speak to others; we speak about others to our tribe, promoting the way our tribe perceives things. It's time for us to learn to communicate a clear and consistent message. When the world hears us, and they google us, if the language isn't consistent, it creates serious questions.
Everything is everywhere like never before in the history of humanity. The world is changing at a rapid pace, and with it your neighborhood, school, work, mall, and everywhere you go. For the first time in history, the whole world is showing up everywhere and changing the neighborhood.
Nothing is more critical than how civil society is being shaped before our very eyes. In the past it was missionaries or diplomats who brought information back from the other side of the world and told us how to interpret it, but not anymore. With the whole world present everywhere, a traditional understanding of communication of faith and of foreign policy is shifting. Diplomats refer to track-one and track-two diplomacy. Track one is diplomat to diplomat or government to government. Track two was popularized by Eisenhower, which is people to people. More is being shaped by track-two diplomacy than track-one. The Arab Spring is a living example of how people are bypassing governments to communicate with one another and establish new norms of behavior in civil society. Though I don't foresee the overthrow of our nation, I do see shifts as we come to know folks from all over the world who are moving in next door to us.
In the past we had track-one religious leaders interpreting what to say and representing us in what was said. Now we are thrust into the middle of relationships with people from other parts of the world, and we have to figure them out without benefit of a neighborhood religious leader. Furthermore, what a religious leader identifies as important and what an everyday follower of a religion sees as important are not always the same thing. How do we relate to this new reality?
Are We Ready?
I believe these immigrants hold the keys to our future. Their presence in our neighborhoods enable us to connect with the rest of the world economically and culturally. They can serve as significant bridges and opportunities for Americans with the rest of the world in business, education, and every domain of society. When we love people and build relationships with them, all kinds of good things happen that were not previously possible. I think this is a partial answer to the businessman who was so worried about the future.
More centrally for Christians, in a very real and literal way, we get to be missionaries—to tell people from all over the world about Jesus. And that can have a multiplying effect. Have you ever thought about how effective it would be if immigrants led to Jesus in our neighborhoods were to reach back to their friends and family in their native lands? The opportunity for non-Anglo-Americans to spread the gospel globally is unprecedented.
But I sometimes wonder if we're ready. In June 2011, the Pew Research Center released the results of a survey called "Global Survey of Evangelical Protestant Leaders." They interviewed evangelical leaders who gathered at the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. The results give a glimpse into the challenges facing the world church when it comes to reaching out to other cultures and religions.
First, we learn that in places where there is no persecution of Christians—as in the Global North—only 44 percent said they believed the church is stronger than ever; 54 percent said it's the same or worse. But in the Global South, where persecution of Christians can be very severe, 71 percent said the church is stronger than ever—and they were optimistic about the future!
It's also interesting how these Christian leaders viewed other religions: 65 percent had negative views of Buddhists and Hindus, 67 percent had negative views of Muslims, and 70 percent had negative views of atheists; Jews were viewed negatively by only 25 percent. The question, of course, is: How can we view any religion or people group negatively when we've been called to love them all and share the good news of Jesus with them?
Our negative feelings are often matched by insensitive actions. As noted above, many of us are in the habit of speaking about others, rather than to them or with them. We know how to speak our tribal language, but not how to speak to other tribes. Neither do we realize sometimes how we are coming across. When I visit Christian websites that attempt to evangelize other groups, I try to imagine myself as one of the people they want to reach. I often find I'd be offended by their stereo typing and condescending attitude.
Another model is offered by Paul in Colossians 4:3–6:
At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison—that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak. Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.
Look at the words he uses: clear, wisdom toward outsiders, making the best of time, gracious speech, know how you ought to answer. In other words, sharing the gospel is more than giving the Romans Road plan of salvation or the four Spiritual Laws. It's not me giving a set of facts for others to act on, but listening to them, understanding where they are in their lives and faith, and dealing with their questions—all the while sharing how Jesus makes all things new.
It's not going to be easy learning a new way of relating to people of other faiths, but we have one of the most effective multifaith evangelistic manuals ever created. It's called the Bible.
A New Testament Era Today!
The Bible is nothing if not a book about migration, globalization, different faiths mingling and mixing—and Jesus Christ speaking to it all.
Every great move of God has always involved migration: Noah; Abraham the pilgrim in the Holy Land; Joseph in Egypt; from Egypt to Canaan with Moses and Joshua; David to Jerusalem; and Jesus and his call for the gospel to be taken to the ends of the earth. This is how the sovereign God spread his word all through ancient history—and how he's doing it now.
Note especially how our situation today is so much like that in Paul's day. Look at Paul at Mars Hill (Acts 17). In his sermon, he began by meeting people where they were, even complimenting them, before moving forward. But much more is going on here than an example of how to speak.
In his article "One World, Under God," in the Atlantic, April 2009, Robert Wright set Paul's ministry to other faiths in its historical context:
The origins of Paul's doctrine of interethnic love ... emerges from the interplay between Paul's driving ambitions and his social environment.... In the Roman Empire; the century after the Crucifixion was a time of dislocation. People streamed into cities from farms and small towns, encountered alien cultures and peoples, and often faced this flux without the support of kin.
Wright goes on to note how this situation is like the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, when industrialization drew Americans into turbulent cities, away from their extended families, and into "families" like Knights of Columbus and Rotary Club. He continues:
Indeed, Roman cities saw a growth in voluntary associations. Some were vocational guilds, some more like clubs, and some were religious cults (cults in the ancient sense of "groups devoted to the worship of one or more gods," not in the modern sense of "wacky fringe groups"). But whatever their form, they often amounted to what one scholar has called "fictive families" for people whose real families were off in some distant village or town.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BOLD as LOVE by BOB ROBERTS, JR. Copyright © 2012 by Bobby Gene Roberts, Jr.. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1 Boldly Loving All My Neighbors 1
2 Confronting All My Fears 29
3 Using All My Faith to Get Out on the Edge 57
4 Serving Others with All My Might 75
5 Requiring All My Truth 101
6 Living Our Faith with All Our Faiths Present 127
7 Challenging All My Tribe 149
8 Forgiving with All My Heart 167
Notes 183
Acknowledgments 187
About the Author 191